A 10-YEAR-OLD girl has been chosen to design one of the show gardens at the forthcoming Bloom festival on the June Bank Holiday weekend in the Phoenix Park, Dublin.
Miah Ní Nualláin and her mother, Melissa, submitted a design to the organising committee of the festival and were successful.
Reigning Cats and Dogs imagines what family pets would dream about for their ideal garden.
Though she is only 10 and ineligible for safety reasons to actually build her creation, Miah is already a veteran of the gardening scene and has been working with her grandfather in the garden since she was two.
Her design will concentrate on how to make a garden friendly towards pets.
It is designed with plants, trees and flowers that have a direct link to cats and dogs, dogwoods and catnip for fun but also plants that are pet friendly, both safe for pets (non-toxic) and durable enough to cope with the interaction of animals.
Miah, from Rialto in Dublin, has two dogs, Cody and Misty, and a cat, Croí.
Gardening runs in her blood. Her uncle Fiann is a professional gardener who has exhibited at Bloom since 2007 and she learned a lot from observing him.
His company, Inspiring Gardens, will install the garden for the festival, which runs from Thursday, May 31st, to Monday, June 4th, and attracts an average of 90,000 visitors every year.
The pet-friendly garden will be a seven metre by five metre creation.
The family is looking for sponsorship to cover a portion of the €10,000 to €12,000 cost of completing the garden.
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